Museums are not normally presenting the works on the walls as provocations to work. It's more like going to a Jacuzzi.

Whenever the medium of photography is useful for a particular task, I use it. If another medium is more suitable I use that.

I have a particular interest in corporations that give themselves a cultural aura and are in other areas suspect. Philip Morris presents itself in New York as the lover of culture while it turns out that if you look behind the scenes, it is also a prime funder of Jesse Helms, someone who is very hostile to the arts.

Art-making is just another part of the consciousness industry.

Artists and art institutions have to learn how to play hardball. A democratic society needs a democratic art and we have a right to demand it.

What I'm very upset about is the attempt to dictate to museums what they show, and the statements made by politicians in Washington that have curtailed the freedom of the National Endowment for the Arts. The attention to those issues is deflected by the spin of my supposedly having trivialized the Holocaust.

A standard line, promoted by people like Clement Greenberg,.. is that politics contaminates art, and Manet is often cited as an example of art for art's sake.